USENIX 2003

I attended the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) this
year in San Antonio, Texas for the O'Reilly Network. The USENIX ATC offers attendees an interesting mix of papers and talks by academia, well-known industry professionals, and researchers working for companies across the world.

Keynotes, BOFs, and WIPs

The conference offers three days of advanced tutorials, but I only arrived for
the keynote by Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon and also the near-famous "In the Beginning Was the Command Line"), three days of technical sessions, Birds of a Feather (BOF)
talks, and Works In Progress (WIPs). Technical sessions are only an hour and a
half long and typically provide a bird's-eye view of the technology being
discussed. BOFs are much less formal, and usually involve the audience working
closely with the speaker to discuss cool new events and happenings (I even
attended a Microsoft BOF -- more on that later). Finally, WIPs allow presenters
to discuss the status of projects that are very much still in the works.

Thursday: Samba, Clustering, and Rsync

My first full day at the USENIX ATC was Thursday, when I made a visit to
"Samba — Ins and Outs, LDAP" by Gerald Carter of the Samba Team. Carter, who
seems to be something of a geek, as you may find when you visit his site, is
the author of LDAP System Administration by O'Reilly & Associates as well as the co-author of Sams' Teach Yourself SAMBA in 24 Hours, with
Richard Sharpe.

If you haven't been keeping up with the open source Samba project, the aim
of which is to provide a Windows-compatible file, print, and authentication service,
hold on to your seat. As Samba users are already well aware, Samba 3.0 is
slated to support Active Directory. According to Carter, the support has reached
stable levels, and is basically ready. Indeed, if your system has Kerberos
and LDAP support already installed when
compiling Samba, the configure script will detect them and build
in Active Directory support for you. At that point, you just need to do some
configuration and you are ready to go.

Later that day I attended a very interesting guru session by Andrew Hume (yes, he does
have a big smile like that in real life) of AT&T Labs (which seems to be doing some very interesting work, according to their research areas page), titled "Legacy
Systems/Big Data/Freenix Clusters." Hume is currently working on a large Linux
cluster used by AT&T as a computational resource and may be moving to one of
the BSDs in the future. If you haven't noticed the power and low expense of
open-source-based clusters, then you need to take a better look at the market.
There are a lot of vendors pushing Linux-based clusters, and it's quite easy to
brew your own custom solutions. Seeing AT&T using these solutions demonstrates
that big business has really taken a hold on open source solutions as a real
cost saver.

Interested in doing a Linux-based cluster? You can build your own Beowulf
if you want, quite easily, by following the guidelines at the Beowulf homepage or by
purchasing a pre-built system from one of the many vendors such as Linux Networx. If you do build a Linux cluster for fun, let me know. I am always interested in HPC on a low budget.

The last session that I attended Thursday was on n-Place Rsync. The talk was
by David Rasch and Randal Burns of Johns Hopkins University. (Unfortunately, I
was unable to find any links to this project. If someone knows where n-Place
Rsync is hiding, let me know and I'll update the article.) n-Place Rsync
was developed as a thesis project with the goal of allowing rsync-like capability for devices with extremely low amounts of storage. Specifically, Rasch and Burns hoped to
address file updates on mobile and wireless devices. The speakers addressed the
problem of file updates on these kinds of devices by doing in-place
replacement where temporary storage was not needed. It's not clear whether
n-Place Rsync has been released into the open source community, but the idea
seems quite useful. I hope to see more about it, and projects based on it, in
the near future at SourceForge.

Microsoft BOF

As mentioned earlier I did make a showing at the Microsoft BOF. What did Microsoft have to say at a conference dominated by those embracing open source? Well, migration,
of course! Microsoft sent people that work closely with their Microsoft Windows Services for
UNIX product to discuss how Microsoft is trying to address the needs of
UNIX administrators. In all honesty, the BOF was very well done. (Whether I say
that because there were plentiful amounts of beer and wine will not be
discussed.)

The Microsoft representatives were quite open about asking the audience what
problems they were having when working with Windows systems in their networks
and how Microsoft could address those problems. They also spoke in depth about
Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX, which they say provides an almost complete
development and execution environment for UNIX software and services. Indeed,
it would appear that the software provides an environment as complete as
Cygwin, but with closer integration into Windows.

For the uninformed, Cygwin provides a
set of libraries and binaries that run on top of Windows to give you near UNIX-
like capabilities and compatibility. For example, you can run a version of
XFree86 on your Windows machine, if you desired.

As far as open source is concerned, the speakers were more than happy to
mention that they had GPL'd software included with Microsoft Windows Services
for UNIX and that the source code was available at microsoft.com. They did not
develop the software, of course, but have included it with their product to
build a more complete environment. Is Microsoft seeing the light? Doubtful. It
would appear that they simply see that UNIX people are using certain software
on a regular basis, and so they had better support it too. This is simply good
marketing.

On a related note, I spoke with both presenters personally after the BOF and
found one obvious characteristic: both had very heavy UNIX backgrounds. The
shared experiences included working with a well-known UNIX operating system
company, developing the initial product that later was vacuumed up into the
Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX product from Microsoft, and even working
with Red Hat. What's the lesson to take from this? Microsoft is hiring the best
that they can find to make sure they can compete with UNIX head-to-head.
Whether they will succeed is best left to future historians.

Friday: USENIX and LinuxBIOS

I spent much of the next morning attending the Annual Meeting of the USENIX
Board. USENIX is obviously having a hard debate on how to better market itself
to those that would best benefit from membership, and much of the meeting
revolved around better ways to do it. It's good to see that a diverse group
such as USENIX continues to try and revitalize its image and work better to
become a part of the larger research and industry communities.

Later Friday night, I attended an absolutely fascinating Work-In-Progress by
the guys from LinuxBIOS. If you haven't been tracking what LinuxBIOS is doing,
then now is the time. LinuxBIOS
replaces the traditional BIOS, allowing a computer to boot quickly and offer
resources as a node to cluster. The LinuxBIOS guys were talking about times of
12 seconds from system start to hand-off to the operating system. What's so
cool about LinuxBIOS is that the project itself is open source, even though
they work closely with commercial interests. LinuxBIOS is showing that the
combination of open source and commercial support can indeed work. I think we
will be hearing more from them in the future.

Saturday: the OSes of Web Hosting

The last sessions that I attended were on Saturday, and focused mostly on
the business side of web hosting and system administration. In the web hosting
guru session, the needs of a web hosting environment were picked apart in
some level of detail. Notably, many hosting environments rely extensively on
open source software. (Surprise, surprise!) Solaris continues to have a very heavy presence with ISPs and web hosting services, but Linux and certainly FreeBSD continue to push into this market. The primary reason seems to be cost. Linux and FreeBSD are known for their
stability, so in many cases the only differentiating factor between them and
Solaris or other UNIX systems are purchase, licensing, and operating costs.
Linux and FreeBSD win here, hands down. Solaris continues to make a difference
when large amounts of IO are concerned, but even there, FreeBSD can really
compete.

Concluding Thoughts

What exactly did I really learn from this conference? First of all,
research is as strong as ever and there is a lot coming out of the USENIX and
open source communities. Also, Samba is really starting to break significant
ground with Active Directory, and it looks like they are ready to really push
into the Active Directory networks that are springing up left and right.

As a parting thought, if you are pushing open source in your network, you
need to be ready to convince management why that solution is the best one,
because Microsoft is not making any pretense about just being another player in
the high-end market. Instead, they are really pushing hard to show that they
have the software and solutions to solve that problem for you, and with their
Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX, they are trying to compete directly with
your UNIX servers to support your own UNIX users. Are you ready to take them
on?

Dustin Puryear
is a consultant providing expertise in managing and integrating UNIX and Windows systems and services, with a strong focus on open source.